Good morning and happy Friday to you all.
I've reached something of an obstacle in my WIP and I'm really unsure how to pass it. I finished planning the first act this week, but found that it all happens over too short a period of time. The first half of the 2nd act needs to cover at least 9 months, as it ends with the birth of the protagonist's son, whose conception is only revealed at the beginning of act two, so the first act needs to follow a broadly similar period of time in order to keep the book feeling consistent and maintain the tempo throughout. Reading back through it, it isn't clear that this is the case and I don't think it works well enough.
What I'm trying to ask is how do I maintain pace while ensuring each act takes places over a reasonably long period of time? Each scene will focus on a specific series of events, so there needs to be a gap between them in order to allow time to pass.
Does anyone have a good examples of books that do this well? I recently read Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis (not his best book, but quite funny), which used a device that broke up each act with a brief overview of events that happened in between, which kind of worked, but felt a little bit contrived.
I don't want to write a full on saga, but the story will take place over a period of 2 to 3 years.
Thanks for your help... if any of this makes sense!
Mark.
I thought the same thing as Kate.
It's not the timeline you need to keep reasonably even, it's the development of each act. You could have lots of key scenes in the first quarter but only a few days have passed in the story's actual timeline, whereas a less amount of key scenes could happen over a period of months. There's no point in adding scenes for the sake of having something happen in real time in the timeline. Cut to the next key scene and fill in any necessary gaps in retrospect if you can. Telling the story in the most interesting way is what's important, and that often means taking great leaps in time.
I can only speak from my own work, the protagonist has what should be a fatal accident in the first chapter, the second chapter jumps a year into his full recovery and it works. The reader (I hope) uses their own imagination to work out there has to be a period of boring none events to get to that recovery. I think as Lucy has gone right to the point there is not a lot to be said on the subject of leaving it to ferment, it's amazing what those bubbles of fermentation release.
Regards Paul.
It's possible that as the story progresses, you may find you have to re-jig what went before, or slot things in to flag up later events. Don't sweat it too much at this stage, Mark. Get the whole thing down first, then see how the pieces really fit together.
Do you need to go through the whole nine months? Most women don't know they are pregnant at first, and many won't tell anyone about it until after the first three months (not tempting fate).
Fictional timelines can be flexible, so long as they are reasonable. In the first draft of my WIP I hadn't noticed that the action all took place during possibly the longest three days know to man. It pays to be aware!